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Haters Gonna Hate...

Aren't haters great? By shamelessly pointing out deficiencies and weaknesses, haters can so easily awaken that burning desire to prove them wrong.

Especially if you're a Growth Hacker.

Even the best marketers run into obstacles and skeptics.

While Growth Hacking continues to successfully disrupt the marketing business, the contrarian opinions in this issue are sure to challenge this notion. So go get some tough love from this week's posts, and use these valuable perspectives to keep your business lean and mean.

Thank you to everyone who shared Growth Weekly on Twitter and Facebook! We appreciate you so much.

With love,
The CoEfficient Labs Team

Growth Weekly

Growth Tools

If social media were a school cafeteria, then Snapchat would be the table where all the cool kids sit. According to this article by Christopher Heine (@Chris_Heine), "70% of Snapchat's 150M monthly users post to it at least once a day." But can Snapchat retain its social status with a new wave of suitors ready to challenge its market share?

Facebook Messenger and Instagram are certainly lurking, but what about upstarts like Kik, Line, and Google's new product Allo? This article profiles each of these apps and considers their strengths, weaknesses, and future potential. Read it to stay current on the social media landscape and make sure you're still in with the in crowd.

Link building is a crucial element in elevating your website up the food chain of Google's rankings. No idea what that means? Then this is the perfect article for you.

In this post by David McSweeney (@top5seo), spells it all out just for you. By investigating link building theory, strategy, tools, and even providing links to other tutorials, this article is as academic as it is useful. Read it and apply David's in depth research and analysis toward improving your site's exposure and SEO.

It's undeniable: the entrepreneurial game demands optimism. Turning an idea into a concrete, money-making product demands risk-taking and commitment. But that's not to say that all ideas are created equal, or that all startups eventually make it big.

In this article, Maxime Pico (@MaximePico), plays devils advocate by poking holes into standard practices, suggesting why many startups are destined for failure, and then proposing an alternative path: the Smoke Test. Using Buffer as an example, Maxime cuts the 6-month exploratory phase down to an air-tight 7 week plan aimed at building a product before actually building it. Use his template, toolkit, and hands on technical explanations to keep your startup lean and poised for growth.

Instagram

Everyone knows that customer reviews are a great way to add social proof to a product page, but what about customer generated photos? How might including those effect product sales? The folks at Vanity Planet were pondering these very questions when they adopted Yotpo's "Social Curation" on their site.

Before, their Spin for Perfect Skin product page, had clean lines, a minimalist feel, and a commendable 6% checkout rate. Yet, the inclusion of photos both curated from Instagram and uploaded by customers lead to dramatic results: a 24% increase in checkout rates over a 10 day test period. Learn from Vanity Planet's success in this post by Yotpo Product Marketer, Doug Baltman. Empower your customers to add their own content, and watch your sales take off as a result.

Twitter

Email blasts, specifically ones with far less authenticity than the one you're reading right now, can be burdensome, invasive, and unwanted. So why do we as marketers continue to take part in something as grotesque and robotic as... spam? Well, perhaps it's because we haven't found a better way.

Thankfully, Aseem Badshah (@aseemb), has offered a realistic alternative: The Twitter DM. In his post, Aseem explains why DMs out perform emails. He also suggests how, with a touch of personality, you can engage with your prospective customers via Twitter and incentivize them toward buying and promoting your product.

Content Marketing

Trying to find the best formula for blog post titles or email subject headlines? No clue as to what makes an audience click, read, or buy? Well, Chris McCarron has crunched the numbers in this post to reveal online tendencies on a massive scale.

Turns out, online audiences and consumers are a fickle bunch. Yet, armed with the statistics from this post, you as a marketer can act with confidence. This post takes an exhaustive look at language and strips it down to its most powerful and provocative elements. Learn from it and reach your audience with carefully crafted words aimed specifically toward "invoking knowledge" and "triggering curiosity."

These days, promotion can be even more important than the content itself. In this article, Dennis (@edwarddennisau) from CoreDNA shows how anyone can successfully promote their content without spending an extra penny. The toolkit and tips that Dennis offers are both rational and incredibly resourceful. Read it to learn the nuts and bolts of exactly how to both set your content apart and get it in front of your chosen audience.

SEO

A growing company must always be prepared to venture beyond preconceived boundaries and limits, and in today's business world that could mean taking your business beyond your national borders. So, if you're pondering marketing to international consumers, or appealing to speakers of different languages, remember: strong SEO remains a vital component of all successful websites.

In this post, Martin Woods (@indigoextra) considers all the variables for you. Learn things like whether to keep your website, or create a new one; whether to use multiple websites or sub-domains; and why manual translation is still preferred to automatic. As Martin puts it: "Today, small businesses have a unique potential to reach a global audience." Be sure to read this post and and take the necessary steps to reach yours successfully.

E-Commerce

In the world of mobile devices, the app is the opiate of the masses. How big are apps? Well according to this post by Neil Patel (@neilpatel), they are expected to hit an annual revenue of $77 billion by 2017.

As you might have guessed numbers like that mean the app market is a crowded place, and it's even worse when you're operating on a shoestring budget. Thankfully this post provides a formula for your app aimed at gaining exposure and converting it into downloads - for free. Use Neil's methods to gain insights into discoverability, reviews, and everything else your app needs to rise above the crowd.

Growth Hacking Op-Ed

Okay, we get it Growth Hacking is an overused term. As it gains greater exposure, it's easy to assume it could eventually dilute amongst the fakers. So why did we include an article in Growthweekly hating the very model we follow? Simple: for perspective.

In this article, Eric Koester (@erickoester), identifies the key problem he sees in growth hacking: a linear approach to problem solving. In doing so, Eric has issued a challenge to marketers to considering building growth via a holistic approach. While we can't say whether the term Growth Architect has any real chance of gaining traction, we can say that the quick fix is not what we're after either. Read this op-ed for a relevant and contrarian perspective on the state of the business.